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By Root 1643 0

And the very fact that, in a phase so far from rapid, faces no longer swept away in a whirlwind, but calm and distinct, still seemed to me beautiful, prevented me from thinking, as I had so often thought when Mme de Villeparisis’s carriage bore me away, that at closer quarters, if I had stopped for a moment, certain details, a pock-marked skin, a flaw in the nostrils, a gawping expression, a grimace of a smile, an ugly figure, might have been substituted, in the face and body of the woman, for those that I had doubtless imagined; for no more than a pretty outline, the glimpse of a fresh complexion, had sufficed for me to add, in entire good faith, a ravishing shoulder, a delicious glance of which I carried in my mind for ever a memory or a preconceived idea, these rapid decipherings of a person whom we momentarily glimpse exposing us thus to the same errors as those too rapid readings in which, on the basis of a single syllable and without waiting to identify the rest, we replace the word that is in the text by a wholly different word with which our memory supplies us. It could not be so with me now. I had looked at their faces long and carefully; I had seen each of them, not from every angle and rarely in full face, but all the same in two or three aspects different enough to enable me to make the necessary correction or verification to “prove” the difficult suppositions of line and colour that are hazarded at first sight, and to see subsist in them, through successive expressions, something unalterably material. I could say to myself with conviction that neither in Paris nor at Balbec, on the most favourable assumption of what, even if I had been able to stop and talk to them, the passing women who had caught my eye would have been like, had there ever been any whose appearance, followed by their disappearance without my having got to know them, had left me with more regret than would these, had given me the idea that their friendship could be so intoxicating. Never, among actresses or peasants or convent girls, had I seen anything so beautiful, impregnated with so much that was unknown, so inestimably precious, so apparently inaccessible. They were, of the unknown and potential happiness of life, an illustration so delicious and in so perfect a state that it was almost for intellectual reasons that I was sick with despair at the thought of being unable to sample, in unique conditions which left no room for any possibility of error, all that is most mysterious in the beauty which we desire, and which we console ourselves for never possessing by demanding pleasure—as Swann had always refused to do before Odette’s day—from women whom we have not desired, so that we die without ever having known what that other pleasure was. It might well be, of course, that it was not in reality an unknown pleasure, that on close inspection its mystery would dissolve, that it was no more than a projection, a mirage of desire. But in that case I had only to blame the compulsion of a law of nature—which if it applied to these girls would apply to all—and not the imperfection of the object. For it was the one that I would have chosen above all others, convinced as I was, with a botanist’s satisfaction, that it was not possible to find gathered together rarer specimens than these young flowers that at this moment before my eyes were breaking the line of the sea with their slender hedge, like a bower of Pennsylvania roses adorning a cliffside garden, between whose blooms is contained the whole tract of ocean crossed by some steamer, so slow in gliding along the blue, horizontal line that stretches from one stem to the next that an idle butterfly, dawdling in the cup of a flower which the ship’s hull has long since passed, can wait, before flying off in time to arrive before it, until nothing but the tiniest chink of blue still separates the prow from the first petal of the flower towards which it is steering.

I went indoors because I was to dine at Rivebelle with Robert, and my grandmother insisted that on those evenings, before going out, I